RIFT Launch Event / Interview (PC)

Over the past five or six years the MMORPG market has been dominated by Blizzard Entertainment thanks to their flagship title World of Warcraft. Proving to be one of the most in-depth games the genre has ever seen as well as the most accessible to new players it’s little wonder the franchise has become so popular over time, with over 11 million monthly subscribers worldwide it is the undefeated, undisputed champion of the MMORPG division. That’s not to say that the game hasn’t been challenged over the past few years; we’ve seen a number of titles come along with hopes of stealing a piece of the extremely large pie however each and every time a challenger has risen the ranks it has been blown away by the far superior WoW.

After seeing what happened to the brilliantly made games Warhammer Online and Aion – which each contained a number of brilliant features – the mere thought of trying to create a game that can be as big as WoW should strike fear into the very soul of games developers worldwide but not Trion Worlds, the developers behind the newest addition to the market: Rift. Everyone who has played an MMORPG will be familiar with the concept of quests, raids and epic journeys across vast online worlds where danger lies behind every corner. Yet it’s not often that players will be mid-quest only to see the atmosphere tear around them as they are invaded by creatures from another dimension hell bent on destroying everything and everyone in the beautiful green planes of their world. Welcome to Rift.

Gaming Heaven was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to attend the Rift launch event in London just last week, where we were allowed a sneak preview into Telera – the world in which the game is played – and we were also given the chance to speak to the lead Content Developer for Trion Worlds, William Cook.

Throughout the launch event it was clear that the biggest concern on people’s minds – and the one thing that seems to cripple new MMORPG releases before they get the chance to grow – was that with so much work gone into the creation of the game and developing the brand new engine people were worried that there would be a lack of game content on release, set for March 4th in the UK. William was keen to quash such rumours and remains quietly confident that they have enough up their sleeves to keep players hooked for months after release.

"Well the content of our world is matched up exactly with the creation of our world. So the size of our world is very carefully planned, the dynamic content that we have is all meant for the world that is there, the same goes with the levelling curve and the content of the story.. The pace is all intentional, we want to make sure that players can spend the time doing things that they enjoy doing. For example you don’t need to do every quest in a zone to level, that’s been a content problem for a while and anyone who has played Aion will understand the problems it throws up. We also wanted to make sure that our content didn’t peter out as the game progressed, a mistake Warhammer Online made as that game has some fabulous beginning zones but fell short as the game went on. So the amount of content, for us at least, isn’t really an issue as you can quest your way through the game and it’s a great way to pick up the story. However we still have these complimentary forms of content that are in a sense, more reusable.

Quests are won and done right? But a Rift is a little bit of evergreen, and it’s a little bit of a different experience every time. They are totally dynamic which means you can do a Rift with 20 people and it will actually scale itself to that difficulty and feel completely different to the one you did with 4 people. We can add more Rifts pretty easily at any given time and they offer players that something a little bit difference from the norm. Then of course we have the zone events and an endgame that is the most in depth and enveloping than any new MMO launch ever. So in short, I’m definitely not worried about a lack of content."

So it seems that Trion Worlds are prepared in that front, however what exactly is it that separates Rift from other, generic MMORPG titles? After all, if Rift wishes to overtake WoW and compete with the likes of Star Wars: The Old Republic in future then it needs to have something special. Well, they feel that they are revolutionising the genre and taking risks that nobody else has done before.

"Well we still have a huge list of things we’d like to implement in future – world events being one of them – and some of the features we have already implemented even I never thought would make it in. I mean, I never thought we’d be able to put invasions on the road and taking over quest hubs, you never do that, you never stop the player from questing and levelling, that’s dumb, that is a rule. But what we realised was that if you put enemies on the road the player doesn’t always have to fight them, sometimes he needs to take a new road like the hobbit from Lord of The Rings. It’s simple features like that which create a completely different type of atmosphere in-game and keep things fresh for players."

One of the most revolutionary elements of Rift is the all new class system, which allows players to build three different classes which can be switched in or out at any given time. The biggest issue Trion Games had with this was making it simple enough for new and casual players to get to grips with whilst also catering to the better versed MMO players.

"Well the paralysis of choice question keeps popping up. The way I like to describe it is if take traditional RPG games players are told to go on epic quests and perform these tasks to earn attributes in a certain skill-set, or in our case to earn new souls for their slot, but that’s like handing a kid a Lego set one block at a time and telling him to go play with it. We want to give players more points (souls) and we wanted to give it to them right away because to put it simply, it’s just more fun. If that’s a little scary then that’s a risk we’re willing to take. What we loved about the new system though is that if players are becoming slightly bored of their class or their character then re-specs are cheap and we offer multiple roles, so there will never be a time when players will grow bored of their character, hopefully."

It seems that the developers are more than happy with how the game turned out and with the hype currently surrounding its launch there’s little wonder why. With the community in mind we’ve been assured that there will be plenty of patches coming within the first few months of release and they are open to any feedback from the community.

"We just hope that the community understand that we’ve tried to do something a bit out of the ordinary and the take to the new concept of interrupting quests for world events and Rift events. There’s a lot of cool MMO’s on the horizon, I hope they do well and push us and I hope WoW tosses a bunch of resources into copying some of our successes as that will push us even further. We have some big plans for the future of this game."

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